


without hope, without witness, without reward

by gardevoire



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Post-Episode: s10e08 The Lie of the Land, The Vault (Doctor Who), episode coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 22:58:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11367396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardevoire/pseuds/gardevoire
Summary: Change isn’t something that occurs overnight. But the Doctor has never been good at losing, and he’s tired of losing her. Time to break the cycle.But perhaps the cycle has already been broken.“Only in darkness are we revealed.”Or: The Doctor, Missy, and seventy years of remembering.





	without hope, without witness, without reward

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this for weeks, and I was so desperate to finish it before TDF that it's probably really poorly proofread. Feel free to let me know where I did fucked up.
> 
> If you've read _so we beat on_ , think of this as the Twissy (and therefore canon compliant) version.
> 
> This season has given me much feels, guys.

This was a good decision, he tells himself.

So many times in the past he’d acted our of anger, resentment. Fear. Always regretting a second too late, in the aftermath, powerless to go back and change his own past.

He’s made this decision out of love.

It’s a good thing, he thinks. Love is good. Love won’t let him lose.

_“This is right. I accept it.”_

He’s not quite sure where those words came from.

*

He sets them spinning through the Vortex, and leaves Nardole in the console room. When he protests, the Doctor makes a shushing gesture.

“Go,” he says, and Nardole does, grumbling under his breath.

The Doctor walks. He walks down endless corridors and past rooms upon rooms upon rooms that seem to recur in a strange, spatio-temporal loop. The TARDIS will not help him here. Presumably, she’d rather jettison the vault into the chaotic emptiness of the Vortex, but they both know that Missy would make her way back, somehow. This is the only way.

(It’s not, of course, but the Doctor refuses to consider the alternative.)

He can tell she’s shifting the corridors around, creating an impossible maze to nest the vault further and further into her depths. But he’s known her for millennia, knows all her tricks by now. Solves the puzzles as quickly as she can create them, and, eventually, she has no choice but to relent.

The room that houses the vault is nondescript, plain and unmarked, but the Doctor can already feel Missy’s lingering presence.

The locking mechanism on the vault is immensely complex; still, the Doctor thinks it could use a couple more layers of security. He resolves to look into this over the next few days, before they land anywhere.

Inside, on the couch, Missy is still sleeping. Without really thinking, as they’d moved her body, the Doctor had undone the intricate up-do she’d been sporting, and Nardole had given him an odd look: a strange blend of confused and accusing.

Now, the Doctor brushes his hand over her cheek, and doesn’t know what to say.

The look _she’d_ given him, when he’d gazed into her eyes and considered death, considered execution and true oblivion, an ending with such resounding finality even the Time Lords had a word for it, the look she’d given him then had been neither angry nor resentful. This time, it was just _I am your friend_ and peaceful acceptance.

This time— 

He can still remember the Master bleeding out in his arms. Had he found peace then? No, the Doctor thinks. _That was him succumbing to his madness._

Prior to today, the Doctor would have thought the Master incapable of peace. Incapable of understanding anything beyond the unending chaos of her own mind.

But, perhaps it is he who has failed to understand.

_“I am your friend.”_

She is.

Not in the way Clara was, or Amy and Rory were. It isn’t even similar to the blended love-friendship he’d had with River, or with Rose (sometimes, he thinks of his duplicate, and wonders if they were happy). 

The Master is not like his other friends.

The Doctor would say that she was his _first_ friend, but not his last, and that sometimes she was, and sometimes she wasn’t. The Master would say that she _always_ was, always had been, but they’d just failed to see eye-to-eye on some things. Little things, like who should rule the universe and whether the death of countless beings could ever be justified.

The Doctor would say that those things were actually fairly important details, thank you very much. The Master would probably point out that the Doctor already ruled the Earth, so what was universal domination but the next step? And besides, _you’ve already caused the death of countless beings._ The Doctor might say he saved Gallifrey, but Missy would undoubtedly look at him with her _checkmate-_ smile and say, hushed, _but you didn’t save the Daleks. And so many others, isn’t that right my dear Doctor?_

_“I need you to know we’re not so different.”_

She’s right—they aren’t.

And now they have the Fatality Index, as proof. The faces of those Executioners, so accustomed to death but perhaps not as accustomed as he and the Master, absolutely terrified as they read over the names of those he’d killed. Or let die. There’s really no difference, is there?

_“Won’t you show mercy to your own—“_

*

He sits by her side as she wakes.

She does so with an easy lethargy, eyelids fluttering, a half-yawn on her lips, turning into an amused grin as she notices his presence.

“Hello,” she says, and it’s sweet and delighted and warm. The Doctor feels a bit warm too, slow and simmering in his bloodstream. Not a cliché, he thinks, but artron energy. That unmistakeable Time Lord spark. Like a shock to the system after you’ve been alone for so long. He should be accustomed to it by now, though, given how frequently they seem to pop back into his lives.

He smiles back though, because how can he not?

“How are you feeling?” He asks.

“Ever the healer,” Missy quips. She yawns again, properly this time. “Much better. Still a bit tired, though. Might be a bit slow for the next few days. But,” she adds, lowering her voice and fixing him with a hard-eyed stare that is somewhat belied by the laziness of her posture and faint amusement in her eyes, “we both know I won’t be going anywhere for, oh, the next thousand years?” She laughs daintily, unaffected.

“You won’t be able to leave the vault,” the Doctor says. “I made a promise, and I do intend to keep it.”

“Yes, yes, I know the drill,” Missy says, waving her hand airily. “On my oath as a Time Lord of the Prydonian Chapter, and so on, and so forth—boring!” She sits up all of a sudden, grabs his shoulder and draws them together like magnets. “But,” she whispers in his ear mockingly, “what are _you_ going to do _,_ Doc-tor?”

The truth is, he doesn’t know. Has thought about it, a bit, over the last few days. One thousand years is a long time. A whole third of his life, by the time it’s over. And what then? He can’t just release Missy. She’s far too dangerous.

_Well what would Clara do?_ thinks a treacherous part of his mind, one unable to let go and straining to remember her face. 

The problem is, he doesn’t really know.

*

It’s strange that she hasn’t gotten out yet. Not that the Doctor _wants_ her to; it’s just that he’s grown so accustomed to her quick and improbable escapes that he just automatically assumes that she has Plans B all the way to Z all lined up, ready for execution (oh the irony). 

_“I’ll do anything. Just let me live.”_

He’d thought it a ploy.

But it’s been three weeks: three weeks spent settling in, creating a presence among the professors at St Luke’s University, three weeks adjusting to linear time and drawing up his schedule of lectures in a way that makes sense to humans, but not Time Lords, three weeks of non-stop _stopping._

And she’s still there.

UNIT had held the Master once, against his will, and there had been that same feeling, the feeling that the Master had consented to be imprisoned, and was simply waiting.

_But waiting for what?_

Is it voluntary?

“Why are you here?” he asks her, on day twenty-six, because he’s tired of wondering.

“Because you caught me,” she says gently, and sips her tea.

*

He’s forgotten something. It’s hard to tell what it is. All those non-memories of Clara: wide, gaping holes in his mind, or maybe plumes of thick grey smoke, diffusing its hazy obscurity throughout his lives. He knows she’d saved him—all of him, and it had nearly cost her everything. And then he’d tried to do the same and—

They taint his other memories, too. There are some things that are small, like the last name of the first queen of the third colony of Serichia, or the exact number of friends he met through Jim the Fish. There are other things that weren’t small. Or maybe they were. He just doesn’t know.

That’s the thing about forgetting. You can piece together some things based on what’s left behind. Other things fade into the fog, and you lose them because you’re not looking hard enough.

*

For a while, they do nothing but tell stories.

“We used to get into such trouble, you and I,” Missy reminisces. There is a light in her eyes that looks a bit like stars. Or perhaps the Doctor has been anchored for too long. Part of him wants to beg to be set adrift, to give himself back up into the welcoming arms of the universe.

But he knows he can’t leave. Can’t _lose._ He’s lost every time, with Missy. He foils her plans, and saves the day, and yet he just keeps losing, over and over.

_“Say something nice.”_

_“You win.”_

She does.

_“…How about that? I win.”_

She always has.

But it’s not a zero-sum game, the Doctor thinks. They are not locked in this strange dance of push/pull, win/lose, live/die; they are not bound by a history that keeps repeating itself; the chasm that separates them is not so wide so as to not be traversable.

They can have this. _He_ can have this. She’s not the only one who wants their friend back.

“Doctor!” Missy snaps her fingers impatiently, drowning him from his reverie. There are still stars in her eyes, and the Doctor wants to drown himself in memories so old they can’t be tainted by death and destruction.

_“…break a million hearts to heal its own.”_

Time feels distorted in his head, now. His own past, perverted by snapshots he just can’t place, timelines that don’t quite converge. There are too many frayed edges, strands of memory like spiders’ silk that tangle together in unfathomable webs, or simply fizzle out into nothingness.

Missy frowns at him. “Where _are_ you today, Doctor?” She presses a hand to his forehead, scrutinises him. “Normally you love a trip down memory lane,” she drawls, and drums her fingers on his forearm. The pressure is constant, and it grounds him. She’s always been good at that.

“Sorry,” he says. He lets his thoughts drift to easier days.

“You went through a lot of regenerations in a very short period,” he remembers. “You were already in your final body, and I had barely reached my fourth.”

“Yes,” Missy says thoughtfully. “I _did_ cycle through the faces quite quickly, for a while.” She lowers her voice conspiratorially, and, even though he knows it’s just an act, he finds himself leaning closer, drawn ever into her orbit. “I was flighty, back then,” she says, and he smiles.

*

They have dinner together.

“So you’ll—what? Show me the light?” Missy scoffs. “I know I said some things on that planet, but we both know you weren’t _seriously_ considering anything, were you?”

“Well, why else would I have saved you?” The Doctor shoots back. He takes a bite of his chicken, and makes a face. 20th century Earth food is truly a travesty.

“Because you love me, Doctor,” she says in a sing-song voice, catches his eye. “You love me so, so much, and it just hurts your little hearts to think about the implications of that.” She takes his hand in her own and looks at him mock-earnestly. “But it’s okay, honey. We have a whole millennia to work everything out.”

The Doctor frowns. Deflects.

“I want to convince you that it’s worth it,” he says. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here,” says Missy, like a plea. “I’m just not who you want me to be.”

The Doctor, dismissively: “What I want doesn’t matter.” It’s a lie. It’s the only thing that _does_ matter.

*

He brings Osgood to the vault. Not both of them, just the one. The one who could be Bonnie, or could be the other Zygon, or could have been the original Osgood all along. _Always the Osgood Box,_ the Doctor might say, clapping his hands, brimming with respect and admiration and just that tiny bit of lingering curiosity.

_Truth or Consequences, Doctor?_

It sounds like something Missy would say.

He brings Osgood to the vault, and shows her Missy. Osgood doesn’t have memories of her sister’s death, but she has the facts. And she _is_ Osgood. In a way. Missy dismembered her, and then Osgood remembered herself. It was all very poetic.

When they step inside, Missy looks up, and gasps theatrically.

“My goodness, would you look at that?” she says. “Knock one down and another pops up! Like real-life Whack-a-Mole.” She mimes hitting an imaginary hammer on an imaginary table. Eyes always wide, always innocent. Endless rage hidden behind a delicate smile. It’s the same gaze that’s watched over the deaths of millions. The same gaze the Doctor is more familiar with than even his own face.

Strangely, it’s always the eyes that give the Master away. No matter the face, the body: the way she looks at things, the way she looks at the _Doctor…_ It’s painfully familiar, and reminds him of home.

This is not home, though, and Osgood is speaking.

“You killed Osgood,” she says, head held high. Always brave, always poised. The Doctor holds her in such high esteem. 

“Why yes, I do believe I did!” Missy plops herself onto the couch. Crosses her legs, one over the other. Taps an arrhythmic beat on her thigh. The Doctor is not paying attention to this. She grins at Osgood, baring her teeth. “She was so very sweet.” Looks at the two of them through lowered lashes. _“So yummy.”_

Osgood says nothing, just watches her. Missy gazes back, predatory, yet amused. The Master at her most dangerous. There is a fragment of Koschei in her effortless grace, in the careless way she flicks her hand. She turns to look at him, now, and smiles coquettishly.

“Can we keep her?”

The Doctor regrets his decision. 

He takes Osgood’s hand, pulls her towards the entrance. She doesn’t struggle, even though she’s obviously worked out what’s coming. He slams the doors shut behind them, and turns to face her.

“Doctor,” she says, and it’s both a plea and a warning.

“This was a mistake,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. No one can know that she’s here. I’m sorry.” Missy shouldn’t even be out of the containment field, and _especially_ not around someone who isn’t the Doctor. She should be chained, imprisoned properly. This is an imitation of imprisonment. He thinks of poor River, locked away in that prison for so long, and so lonely. His past self, visiting her night after night, trying to enact an apology he could never bring himself to put into words.

River wouldn’t want him to do this. She wanted him to be kind. This, this is not kind.

Hiding his best friend away behind locked doors is not kind. Punishing her, by way of this strange little box that might be bigger on the inside but will never be big enough, is not kind. Bringing Osgood into this was not kind. And what he’s about to do…

He places his fingers on her temples. He tries to be gentle, but even so, he can feel her trembling. But she doesn’t resist, because she understands. And the Doctor feels so cruel, and so, so tired.

Afterwards, they have tea and scones in his office, and she asks, “So, why did you call me over?”

He says, “Oh, I was just feeling lonely.” Smiles. It’s a lie. He doesn’t feel lonely, anymore. Just lost, and full of regret. “I don’t know anyone in 1977.” Also a lie. He should try to find the Brigadier.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll return you to your time.”

She says, “I could talk to them. Warn them about what’s coming.”

He opens the TARDIS doors. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but you can’t.”

Nardole comes in minutes later. “Did I hear the TARDIS?”

The Doctor doesn’t even glance up, engrossed in some papers. “No.”

*

“Being good,” the Doctor says, gesticulating at the chalkboard, “is not automatic.”

“It’s not something you just do because it’s instinct. _Instinct_ is self-preservation. We want to survive, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences. So being good—it’s not a reflex. It’s a _choice._ It’s a choice we have to make every day, time and time again, until it becomes a bit like habit, until you don’t remember the other path.”

His second-year Chemistry students stare at him, bemused. One looks ready to raise their hand, so the Doctor raises a finger to his lips and begins scrawling on the chalkboard. _GOOD,_ he writes, in big, bold letters in the centre. _NOT GOOD,_ he adds beneath it. Draws an arrow from _GOOD to NOT GOOD,_ and another one going the other way. An endless cycle. Like life and death. Missy has always been a fan of such dichotomies: with us or against us, the one or the other. Everything has its opposite. She also likes to blur those lines.

_“Everyone’s a bit of both.” Missy, improvising, trapped yet unafraid._

“Everyone’s a bit of both,” he echoes. “No one is entirely good, but no one is entirely evil. It’s like…” he racks his brains for an Earth analogy. “It’s like the angel and the devil on your shoulder, right? Constantly in competition. And you have to choose which one. Every time. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s harder, sometimes it’s just habit. But you _still_ —“ he punctuates each word with a knock on the chalkboard. _GOOD._ _‘“have—“ BAD. “to—“ GOOD. “choose.” BAD._

The boy raises his hand again, and the Doctor ignores him.

“But how do you choose?” He asks them, rows upon rows of blank faces, alternating between staring at him, goggle-eyed, and snapping their gazes back down to their textbooks, as if they think they’re in the wrong class. “What is good?”

“Excuse me professor,” the student tries once more. The Doctor barrels on.

“Will we ever even be able to know? Is there an objective measure of good and bad? Who knows? Certainly not me. But we do the best we can. And sometimes, the best we can isn’t quite good enough, but at least—“ He is interrupted.

“We’re supposed to be doing complex stoichiometry,” the boy says pompously. “We _need_ to take this course in order to graduate?” Make no mistake, his voice definitely rises in intonation at the end of the sentence. The Doctor might admire his confidence, if he weren’t so irritated by the constant posturing.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he waves at the boy aggressively. “Are you the professor here?” The student seems taken aback, and shakes his head slowly. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Look, I’m trying to teach you an important _life_ lesson here, and all you want to do is talk about chemical equations?”

“Alright,” he continues. “Here’s some chemistry for everyone. Anyone that gives me an equation, or even just a method, for quantifying kindness, will get full marks for the subject.” There is some murmuring among the students, hushed whispers of _is he serious?_ and _what does that even mean?_

He doubts anyone of them will even come close, but the results will probably be worthy of at least _some_ further discussion. And it’s not like he needs the information. Koschei and Theta had completed the same task as nine year olds, over the span of twenty minutes. The perks of being a Time Lord. Much more brainpower at a much younger age.

He dismisses them twenty minutes early, leaving them with some vague remarks about reading the textbook in their own time, and heads down to the vault.

*

_Once upon a time, there was a little boy on Gallifrey who thought he knew everything. But no one can know everything. And so, despite knowing everything, the boy understood nothing._

_“What does it mean to be good, do you think?” asks Theta, staring up at the sky. There’s a cloud in the shape of the Citadel, and he makes a mental note to do an in-depth comparison once they return to the dorm._

_Koschei raises his eyebrows. Or he probably does. Theta can’t see him, but he’s fairly certain that it’s the type of thing he would do, in this situation. “Why do you ask?” he responds, and, yep, that’s definitely his raised-eyebrow voice._

_“I was reading an old book,” Theta says, and then pronounces its name, a series of words in Old High Gallifreyan that have no corresponding English translation. “And the hero thought she was doing the right thing, but she was wrong.”_

_“The wrong thing for the right reasons?” Koschei asks. He traces the path of a passing flutterwing with his index finger, and then gracefully transitions to scrawling maths expressions in the air._

_Theta frowns. “Maybe. I’m not really sure.” He looks over at his friend, and smiles. Koschei is now working on some seven-dimensional calculus problem, and Theta leans over to correct one of his imaginary equations. “That’s why I wanted to ask.”_

_“Thanks,” Koschei says absently. He finishes his work with a flourish, and turns to face Theta. “Well, what do you think goodness is made up of?” They must look at this like scientists, because that’s what they are. Anything can be computed, quantified, so long as you have enough processing power._

*

Missy responds much better than any of his students.

“Well of _course_ it’s a choice,” she drawls. “You think I couldn’t be good, if I really tried? Remember when you sent me your confession dial?”

The Doctor scoffs. “How is that a good example? You tried to make me kill Clara!”

Some things, like Missy, help to lift the fog. He can remember her, goading him and beaming as she'd done it, and he’d been so close to killing that Dalek in cold blood, but there was something so devious in that expression, and then the Dalek had called for _mercy,_ Missy had run and then—

Empty, black space. Empty, unfulfilled time.  


“Yes, but I’d made the _choice,”_ Missy points out, extracting him from his musings. “I didn’t _have_ to go to all that trouble. I could have just said, “oh, Doctor, here’s your darling pet human in a big Dalek suit, isn’t that adorable?” and everything would have been just fine _,_ but I _decided_ to mess with you. Just like I _decided_ to bring back the last of the human race in tiny metal casings and make them kill their ancestors. Or like I _decided_ to help you in the Death Zone, and then _decided_ to help myself to immortality when you refused my assistance!”

“You didn’t help yourself to immortality,” the Doctor corrects her. “You _tried_ to, and then the Brigadier punched you in the face.”

“Yes, well…” Missy considers this. “I didn’t say all my plans were _good,_ did I?”  


“Actually,” the Doctor parries, “in the context of this conversation, none of your plans have ever been _good._ But, more importantly, they also weren’t very effective.”

Missy pouts.

“So then, _my dear Master,”_ says the Doctor, with no small amount of irony, “how would _you_ quantify kindness?”

Missy leans forward in her couch, clasps her hands together. This is honestly the Doctor’s favourite Master—the one that’s intelligent and shrewd, brilliant and inventive, the Time Lords’ greatest creation (and their worst). “Well,” she says, “your students are going to have it all wrong. They’ll go on for hours about utilitarianism and weighing the benefits against the costs, but they’ll miss the most important thing.”

“Unconditionality,” they say as one, and both grin. Theta and Koschei had come to the same conclusion, all those years ago, lying side by side on vermilion grass. Between the two of them: more than enough processing power.

“Your Dr. Song was clever,” Missy says. “Without hope, without witness, without reward. _That’s_ kindness. _That’s_ the threshold of goodness. _Evil—”_ and she stretches out the word, let’s it roll off her tongue languidly, “—always needs an audience. There must always be someone there, a witness to those most unspeakable acts.” She bats her eyelashes at him, and he rolls his eyes. “That’s where you come in, my dear.”

The Doctor resists the urge to roll his eyes. “As a witness.”

“Sometimes,” Missy says. “Not always. You’re not my _only_ witness.” The Doctor knows this. Knows that Missy has other enemies, just as he does. She doesn’t like the rivalry, but she condones it. She could have eliminated her competition at any time. Could have had Davros assassinated; could have taken on the Cybermen and destroyed them (as opposed to acting as a well(ish)-intentioned enabler); could have obliterated the Daleks during the Time War (that was his job, though).

_“I was so scared.”_

Lies, lies, lies. The Master knows no fear. Except that… perhaps she does.

_“I’ll do anything. Just let me live.”_

Other enemies, then. The Doctor knows he was never the Master’s sole focus. Knows that there were other planets, systems, entire galaxies that fell at the Master’s feet. He doesn’t know what became of them. Doesn’t want to know. But she always came back. Still does.

“Not just a witness, though,” she says thoughtfully. “Sometimes you’re a foil too. An antithesis. A worthy adversary. Those were the good old days, weren’t they Doctor? I had such fun. Do you want to know why?”

The Doctor shakes his head, knowing she’ll tell him anyway.

“Because,” and Missy sighs melodramatically, “constantly winning is _so_ boring. Winning means nothing ever changes. And there’s no fun in that, is there? No challenge…” she giggles. “But constantly being on that precipice, hovering between absolute victory and absolute defeat… now _that’s_ a fun game.”

_It’s not a game,_ the Doctor would like to say.

It is likely true, though. The Doctor has long thought that the Master, deep down, actually enjoyed being thwarted. Bar the time on the Valiant, there was always a hint of a smile, a faint amusement in the eyes, as he escaped incarceration, dodging back into the cosmos to devise a new, grander, _madder_ plan. 

“Not this time, though,” Missy says, catching his train of thought.

“No,” the Doctor says, and, carefully, reaches over and takes her hand. “Not this time.”

*

The thing is, Time Lords just don’t forget in the same way that humans do.

When you’re a regular being _(human)_ , with limited brain capacity, things just fall out of your head like grains of sand being washed out to sea: inevitably, yet unpredictably. You never notice when they go, and you can only keep the most important ones, the ones you hold tight and never let go. Everything else… it all just fades away. Even when you forget whole chunks at once, like a night out with friends, or a whole year of whirling around the universe, the mind rewrites the story for you, so it just feels normal.

Time Lords don’t forget. Not naturally. Their brains aren’t wired for it. You can wipe a Time Lord’s memories, but their minds will always straining to recover the lost data, fighting to put the shattered pieces back together.

But sometimes you have to forget. Because it’s hard to face the truth.

Funny how they say dreams are a manifestation of reality. Of memories. That’s always the same, no matter who you are.

The Doctor has nightmares/memories. At night, on the nights he _does_ sleep, he dreams of the Time War, and _exterminate_ echoes in his ears, intermingled with the screams of _two point four seven billion—_

He has to forget. He’d never move on otherwise.

When he doesn’t dream of fire and ash, he dreams in pieces. Fragments.

Flashes of colour, or the faint contours of a visage, like half-finished paintings. Always that short-lived feeling of memory, gone before he can dig deeper. Picturesque landscapes that he _knows_ he recognises. Lines of dialogue that he can’t quite place.

He thinks it would help if he could just go and _look._

When you’re a Time Lord, you _feel_ the Earth turning beneath your feet, hurtling through space at sixty seven thousand miles an hour, a train wreck waiting to happen. He’s clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and all he wants to be able to do is to let go.

There’s a familiar line. Clara didn’t have to save him then, because Rose was there.

_“All those years, all that history, and no one was looking.”_

That’s an easy one. He remembers that.

*

He finds it difficult to broach the subject again.

“You said you’d let me teach you.”

“Teach me what?” Missy turns the page in her book, which the Doctor knows she isn’t _really_ reading, because it’s upside down and she’s ripped out about half of the pages.

He tries a different approach. “You’ve been going a bit…”

“Stir-crazy?” she finishes, amused. “Well, it’s not like you’ve left anything _fun_ in here.” She tears another page, and busies herself fashioning a paper crane.

“I just want to help,” the Doctor protests. “I want to help you.”

“It seems that the Doctor is in,” Missy drawls. “Such an apt title, isn’t it?”

_“How sanctimonious is that?”_

“Tell me you’ll consider it,” he says. “We could expedite your sentence, even! Travel together, like we always said we would.”

“Every star in the sky,” Missy murmurs, and one of the Doctor’s hearts leaps into his throat. She nods slowly, and she’s smiling, and it’s the most beautiful thing the Doctor’s seen in centuries.

“Why is this so important to you?” Missy asks finally. “I’m here, aren’t I? It’s not like I’m causing any trouble from this little room.” She hands him the finished crane, a mockery of a peace offering.

“I don’t know,” says the Doctor, and it might be the most honest he’s ever been. “It just is.”

*

She doesn’t exactly get better. The Doctor tells her stories, lists scenarios he’s been faced with, tries to reconcile her worldview with his own, but, in the end, they’re polar opposites. He’d have better luck forcing two ends of a magnet together.

Still, he tries, and she says she does, too.

“I’m… engaging,” she offers, occasionally, when the Doctor has grown weary with frustration and self-loathing. “You know it’ll take time. With you as the teacher, and me as your hapless student, well…” She gives him a lopsided smile that’s half Master, half Koschei _(–they’re one and the same, his brain points out. –no they aren’t, pleads his treacherous heart.)._ “It could take centuries.”

“We’re aiming for decades,” the Doctor replies sometimes; sometimes, he just gets up and leaves.

On one occasion, when the former option seems more favourable than the latter, he comes across an unexpected detail in the Master’s life.

“Give me another,” she offers. Settles back onto the couch, adopts a leisurely pose. The Doctor turns back to his chalkboard.

“The Teneluptian System,” he says, chalk in hand. “in the year U64528. Intra-galactic revolution. On the one end: the old guard. Strict, unambitious, likely to fall to internal division within the next century of so, anyway. On the other: a sizeable group of dissenters. Spreading their ideological precepts across the worlds by way of extensive propaganda. I landed just before the Uprising at Jintarn.” He scribbles a few dot points about the history of the revolution.

“Hm,” Missy says. “Teneluptian System. Quite beautiful, once they’d abolished the Imperialists— _very_ poor name choice, by the way. I was there too, you know.”

The Doctor frowns. “Where?“

“At Jintarn, of course!” she says dismissively, as if it should be obvious, even though it most certainly _isn’t_. “Giving the revolutionaries a little _helping hand,_ if you catch my drift.” She winks, an affected, over-the-top gesture.  
  
“Why?” the Doctor asks, momentarily taken aback. It doesn’t make any sense. The Master he knows would never go out of her way to _aid_ a political revolution. It’s more likely that _she_ was the one they were revolting _against._ “That’s hardly your style.”

“Well,” Missy drawls, and gets to her feet. She dances, light-footed and playful, over to the Doctor, who is still reeling from this revelation. “It’s not like we’ve never been on the same side before.” She plucks the chalk from his hand, uses it to draw two tiny stick figures holding hands. One of them (whom the Doctor takes to be himself) is waving a stick-like object (which the Doctor takes to be his sonic screwdriver) in the air and appears to be shouting; the other (very clearly the Master, if the maniacal grin is anything to go by) is holding a Teneluptian abolitionists flag (which is depicted in a surprising amount of detail, given the tiny scale of the drawing). She adds a large cartoon heart, which encompasses them both.

“That’s not the point,” the Doctor protests. “We only ever worked together when we were forced to. Like on Earth, when you’d concoct those crazy schemes, and when they invariably didn’t work out, needed help saving your own skin! _You,”_ and he gestures vaguely and haphazardly towards the Master, “only ever do good deeds when they work in your favour. That’s how your brain works. It’s all…” he waves his hand in the air, “quid pro quo.”

“They were causing absolute chaos,” Missy trills happily. “Why wouldn’t I be into that?”

“They were overthrowing an oppressive, outdated government by way of protest!” he says. “That’s the exact _opposite_ of what you’re into. Happy endings. I gave a speech,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

“Ah, my dearest Doctor,” Missy says sweetly, draping her arm across his shoulders. “You’ve got to stop looking at the universe through those naive, rosy glasses.” With the chalk, she draws another diagram, two distinct parties, separated by a towering wall: on one side, the Doctor, making his grand speech about progress and sovereignty, surrounded by cheering crowds; on the other, herself, distributing weapons and war strategies to a group of highly-trained operatives (he knows they’re highly-trained because she goes to the extra effort of drawing in an arrow pointing to them, labelling them as such. She’s never been one for subtlety, really).

“And ‘Uprising’ was a mis-translation on your TARDIS’s part,” she continues. “That word varies slightly in meaning depending on the local dialect. In Jintarn, it largely meant ‘battle’.” She taps him on the nose with the chalk. Particles of white dust drift downwards.

“Admit it, Doctor,” Missy says, dangling the piece of chalk between her thumb and index finger, swinging it back and forth like a pendulum. “You’re not always right. And you don’t always know the whole story.”

Suddenly, it’s very hard to look at her.

Missy withdraws, perhaps sensing she’s hit a nerve. That much has changed, at least. Times past, the Master would have kept rubbing salt in the wound until the Doctor exploded with pent-up fury. This Master is a bit more cautious, a bit more level-headed—especially in comparison to that last, particularly chaotic regeneration. She presses a kiss to his jaw, and smiles delicately.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she murmurs, “they didn’t start executing the dissidents until after the third election.” Ah, there’s the salt.

It’s too much. The Doctor leaves.

*

_“You understood, once,” the man who is now known as the Doctor says. “Why did that change?”_

_“My dearest Doctor,” the man who became the Master replies. “You, of all people, should get the difference between knowing,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “and understanding.”_

_His gaze flickers to the Doctor’s outstretched hand just once, and only for a fraction of a second, but they are Time Lords, and they live in the spaces between one second and the next._

_“Please,” says the Doctor. “Stand with me.”_

_There is another brief moment in which he thinks the Master might, but then the spell is broken, and the Master withdraws, and disappears into his TARDIS._

_“What do we do, Grandfather?” Susan asks, as the Doctor allows his hand to fall to his side. “What do we do now?”_

_“We run,” the Doctor says, “and we never, ever stop.”_

_( Was that a dream? Someone_ had _stopped him, talked to him in the repair shop._

_“…Sorry, but you’re about to make a very big mistake.”_

_Clara?_

_Probably not. )_

*

The story stays with the Doctor for weeks, and for weeks, he finds himself unable to enter the vault, always walking over to the basement, then remembering some unfinished marking, or making it halfway down the stairs before realising he’d left the kettle on (which he knew was an excuse because he usually just got Nardole to handle that sort of thing), or simply standing statue-still, the pads of his fingers barely brushing the intricate designs that traverse its doors.

In the meantime, he goes and reads up on the events of the Teneluptian Insurgency. Finds out more than he ever needed to know. And Missy is right, because of course she is. The rebels overthrew the government (somewhat violently), took power (a bit more violently), and then, within about fifty years, essentially established an autocratic Empire. It had all been very violent, by the end.

“That’s the trouble with happy endings my dear,” Missy says, when he finally works up the nerve to visit again. She settles down beside him, and he leans against her. It feels like the old days. “There’s a question that lingers in the air, a question that no one asks. It’s ever-present, but intangible, like wisps of smoke. It floats there, just out of reach, at the end of every story.” She smiles at him, still ever-so-sweet and terrifyingly enchanting. 

“What is it?” the Doctor asks, and is surprised by how subdued he sounds.

Missy smiles at him again. She’s so much more generous about that, this regeneration. The last Master had only ever graced him with deranged grins: unbalanced, terrifying flashes of teeth that set the Doctor on edge as much as they filled him with a desperate longing and self-inflicted melancholy that had echoed through his lives until he met Missy again. But Missy smiles, more gently this time, and her eyes are soft. She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. _“What happens next?”_

For once in his life, the Doctor doesn’t have a response. _They rebuild,_ he wants to say, knowing it’s not true, and it’s not enough. So he listens, and wonders how it is possible that, after everything, she is still capable of teaching him anything new.

“The aftermath of a revolution is so incredibly interesting,” Missy says, twining her fingers through his hair. “I’d say it’s even better than the coup itself. It’s a great time to take over a planet, really. You have so many different political interests, all vying for primacy, and then of course there are the insurgents themselves, bursting with ephemeral ideals and grand ambition, but lacking the skills necessary to implement them…”

*

He is frustrated, as always. She is frustrating, as always.

“Well, I don’t see why you couldn’t just shoot him and be done with it,” she sniffs. “He’s trying to invade, so we stop him!”

“Without killing him!” The Doctor exclaims. “That’s the point.”

“Oh, stop it with the eyebrows,” Missy scowls, and throws her chalk at him. “I _hate_ it when you do the eyebrows. They get all judgemental, like they’re about to start prosecuting. And let me tell you,” she adds, “they have no jurisdiction in here.” Her glare is somehow _actually_ fixated on his eyebrows, like she blames them for putting her in this situation.

“Attack eyebrows,” the Doctor agrees, and flings the chalk piece right back. “And we’ve discussed this! You don’t always have to kill people to get what you want! There are other options!”

“Oh, like what?” Missy rolls her eyes, and they really are a perfect match this time, aren’t they? Intensely stubborn and Scottish and great at sniping—truly a sight to behold with the sniping this time. The Doctor would hesitate to call it ‘banter’, but he supposes there’s no viable alternative. “Negotiation? Emotional crippling? Appealing to his _morals?”_

“Yes!” the Doctor practically shouts.

“No!” Missy raises her voice, too, and it’s her _I’m about to make a point, so you’d better shut up and listen_ voice, so the Doctor backs down. Slightly. “It’s a waste of time! There are too many unknown variables involved, there’s too much… risk.” She grimaces on that last word, and the Doctor 

“And you have to take that risk,” the Doctor says. “You have to risk everything, rather than compromise who you are.”

“That’s who _you_ are,” Missy says, deflating somewhat. “Not me.”

“I’m trying to show you—“

“—That there’s another way, I know, I know,” Missy sighs, and runs her hands through her hair in apparent frustration. “You know, Doctor,” she says, “one day you’re going to risk everything, and have it backfire you in the most spectacular way.”

“Maybe,” says the Doctor. “I guess we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

*

He thinks they reach a turning point, a few weeks later.

Missy breaks the silence. “Do you think it would even make a difference?” she asks.

The Doctor doesn’t understand. “Do I think what would make a difference?” He closes his own book. _The Great Gatsby._ A wonderful tale of hope and longing and second chances. Until you reach the ending. It’s been torn out, of course, but he knows it anyway.

_So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past._

Missy shrugs. “If I turned,” she shudders, mouth twisting into a pained grimace, “— _good.”_ She spits out the word as if it’s a disease, turns her book over and over in her hands. The Doctor can’t tell what she’s reading, but he has some idea. “Would it make up for all the things I’ve done?”

“No,” the Doctor says automatically, because it wouldn’t. The things the Master’s done, all the people she’s killed, the pain she’s caused… They’re etched in the annals of history, no, and there’s no turning back so much time. “But it would be good.”

“Me being ‘good’—are you sure you want that?” she asks. “What do you really want, Doctor?”

“I want us on the same side, for once,” he says. He studies her profile: there is something anticipatory in the way she casts tiny glances at him, as if she thinks she can’t see. Like she’s waiting for something to happen.

He expects her to scoff, say something along the lines of _your side, Doctor,_ and start yet _another_ dispute about morals and virtue and kindness and things that the _Doctor is tired of thinking about_ (because if he thinks hard enough, she starts convincing _him,_ and neither of them can afford that).

“Okay,” Missy says instead, following a brief silence. She frowns. The Doctor turns back to his book. “Okay.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he observes Missy watching him pensively. After a moment, she settles down again, opening _Heart of Darkness_ for what must be the hundredth time.

*

“Do you remember the Valiant?” he asks, knowing she does. “Every night, you’d come visit me, bearing news of yet another nation burning.”

“I do,” she says warily. She’s been a bit more docile, recently, and the Doctor doesn’t know what to make of it. He doesn’t know what to make of a vulnerable Master. It feels wrong, like seeing Jack Harkness spring back to life, again and again, or a thousand thousand paradoxes, stacked atop one another like building blocks. Instinctively, the Doctor can’t make sense of it.

“The Year That Never Was,” he says. “You won, that time. Ruled the whole planet for a year. Destroyed a large chunk of the population.”

“Decimated,” she corrects.

_“Nice word, decimate.”_

He’s been dreaming of it, recently, pressed up against the bars of that tiny cage, hands old and shrivelled and weak. He remembers the cold, remembers weeks upon weeks with no hope, no guarantee Martha would succeed. So alone. And the Master, taunting him, a vice-like grip on Lucy’s wrist and a tighter grip on the Doctor’s bleeding heart.

“You brought them back,” she offers. “Undid my little paradox—that took me so much time and effort, you know. But you undid it so quickly. All those people, back to life in a single instant.”

“I rewound time,” the Doctor says. “How did that happen?” There are misshapen memories, floating around in his head, that only Missy can untangle.

“I rewound it first,” she responds. “And you had Archangel on your side, and all those tiny minds supporting you.”

That’s right. He remembers it more clearly—the rush of power, all those souls chanting his name, offering their minds up for his own taking. He sees, sometimes, so vividly, the lure of power. Like a siren’s song, swaying the subconsciousness. It always comes so easily to him, that he wonders what if would be like just to take it for himself. He could take the Master up on her offer. Travel the stars, and bend them to his own will. It would be so easy. He’s the Doctor. He could make them better.

Missy is frowning at him as if she understands, and that alone is enough to break the spell.

“I’d forgotten,” he says slowly. “Was Clara there too?”

Missy rolls her eyes. “Martha Jones,” she snaps. Then: “God, why do I have to keep track of these things for you?”

She does, because he can’t, not right now. But he won’t tell him that, even if she already knows. Right now, she’s his only anchor to reality, and the one person he can trust to not lie about his past. She’s lied about many things, but he can trust her, at least, with this.

He nudges her. “Thanks,” he says.

“You’re getting old, my dear,” Missy responds, a grin beginning to curl at the edges of her mouth. “You should retire if your memory’s going. We could get you a little house on some planet out there, and you could keep bees, and solve mysteries…”

He kicks her, and she laughs at him.

*

“How can I save them when I’m lost to the dark?”

Inside, Missy is silent. He hasn’t been to see her since the space station, has resorted to sending Nardole in time and time again rather than face her himself.

In many ways, he’s terrified, in a way he never has been before. This is more risk than even he has ever condoned; he is more of danger to himself than he has ever been.

It’s also a reminder, a reminder that, at the end of the day, he will never truly be able to trust Missy. If he trusted her with his blindness, she’d destroy him. She can know, but he can’t put her in a position to exploit her knowledge.

But she knows, and she won’t speak to him.

The Monks are coming—this he knows. He doesn’t know when, or where, or even how. But they’re coming. And the Doctor is struck with the distinct fear that he _will_ need Missy’s help, without hope, witness or reward, and he doesn’t know that he can trust her to give it.

But he doesn’t have much of a choice. 

_“Memories are so much worse in the dark.”_

He is continually plagued by these constant reminders of his past, a past even he himself cannot render alive in his mind. Clara follows him like a shadow, always keeping his own secrets from him and evading his desperate attempts to find her.

They talked in the Cloisters. And there was that waitress in Nevada. And Rigsy’s drawing. 

He has to hold tight to those memories, and never let go, lest they fade and disappear forever.

*

_“Your version of good isn’t absolute. It’s vain, arrogant, and sentimental.”_

He can’t stop thinking about it. Her dispassionate, utilitarian speech. She’s right, in a way. Putting Bill’s life above the lies of all other humans, 

There’d been a moment there, before Bill had found her mother in her dreams and thoughts, that the Doctor thought he’d lost her. Would that have been a win? Was it selfish, in that moment, that he had cared more about her than he had about another 7 billion others combined?

Sometimes he thinks that it’s he who needs to be stopped. Donna had stopped him, more than once. Held up a mirror and forced him to look into his own reflection.

Strange, that _Time Lord Victorious_ would be one of his most lucid memories

*

Bill leaves to go do her homework, and the Doctor stays. He stays, and watches the students mill around the courtyard, oblivious to the jarring six months of rewound memories coiling within their minds. Oh, some will remember, and they might chalk it up to dreams, or stories. Funny how so many of those legends are based on truth.

Very few will _think,_ will hold on to those memories until they become again that strange, distorted reality. They’ll be able to analyse the past, and remember it. They might keep quiet, if they’re clever, or they might speak out and be shunned, or ridiculed.

People don’t like to look at that which they cannot understand. 

Perhaps that’s his problem. He cannot recreate something he does not understand. Something that seems unthinkable. Something impossible, like hoping and dreaming and longing and having those desperate cries be heard.

_“In the final hour, in the deepest pit.”_

There is hope, he thinks. Hope is all he has. It’s all anyone ever has.

His mind turns, as it ever is, to Missy. Missy pleading for her life, Missy pleading for his friendship, pleading for him to understand. He wants to understand her. All those year ago, at the Academy, he’d thought they’d never change. That they’d always have each other. That they’d always _be_ there for one another, to _save each other—_

Without hope.

_“Go on then. Do it.”_

Without witness.

_“Get out of the way.”_

Without reward.

_“Wonder what I’d be without you.”_

It’s like being doused with ice water; the fog lifts. Strange, the way you miss things when you’re not looking hard enough. When you don’t want to look. The Doctor, that mysterious wanderer of worlds, that unexpected saviour of systems. He who has never been afraid of anything… except himself.

_“The one you abandoned. The one you left for dead.”_

He wonders if she’s been waiting for him, this whole time, as opposed to the other way round.

*

“You didn’t mention this bit,” she says, and when he looks up at her he can see tears welling up in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He has a lot to apologize for. He wonders if this means he can trust her again. That’s the thing about trust. It’s so often misplaced.

“But this is… good.”

“Okay,” whispers his oldest friend and first enemy, staring into nothingness. 

_Virtue is only virtue in extremis._

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Let's all hope Twissy get the happy ending they most certainly _do not_ deserve.


End file.
